CoinCube in responding to
my prior post, you’ve written nothing to refute the reasons that SegWit is insecure and your BTC can be stolen.
You are trying to argue against the ancillary point I made about it being
impossible for proof-of-work to remain under decentralized control. This argument below has nothing to do with why SegWit is insecure and incompatible with Satoshi’s Bitcoin protocol. So you’ve entirely avoided rebutting the main reason I gave you for why BCH is superior to SegWit.
The linked paper on selfish mining…
It’s not primarily a research paper about selfish mining. You’re confused. The selfish mining research paper was
Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable (and several follow on papers of which this one below is not).
The flaw is not due to selfishness, but rather due to misaligned incentives in the protocol when block rewards decline and transaction fees increase.
…was quite interesting but I draw the opposite conclusion from it that you do.
If your response was phrased as one of probing or your ideas you want me to respond to, I would find it to be less hubris than when you as a n00b declare that you can make conclusions accurately, without first testing your ideas against someone more expert in the technological area than you are.
Certainly you would not write in that tone to Core developers would you?
From the relevant paper section 3.1
http://randomwalker.info/publications/mining_CCS.pdf
We also assume that miners always have space to include all available transactions. If the block size is not large enough to meet demand for transactions, we believe the qualitative content of all our results continue to hold, but the quantitative impact is mitigated. This belief is supported by the following data, taken from the most recent 1000 blocks (roughly one week’s worth) as of July 11, 2016: of these 1000 blocks, 702 are full. Of the full blocks, the total sum of transaction fees ranges from 0.03 BTC to 4.51 BTC. The mean is 0.49 BTC and the standard deviation is 0.25 BTC, more than half the mean. It’s unclear how to extrapolate these data to the future, but it is clear that there will indeed be fluctuation in the available fees that fit in a block. So if the block size is not large enough to meet demand for trans- actions, even though the available fees immediately after a block is found will not be zero (as in our analysis), they may be significantly lower than (say) ten minutes later. So even though our exact analysis will not apply in this setting, the intuition does carry over.
The paper does not evaluate the situation where block size is limited miners do not have space to include all available transactions in a block, and fluctuations of fees are not large..
Yet this scenario is exactly what you would expect to see in a widely adopted BTC functioning under a gradually increasing block size such as is currently advocated by the Core team.
You’re grasping at strings.
The paper clearly points out that since transaction fees are
power-law distributed because wealth is, then it is irrelevant whether there are extra transactions waiting in the mempool, because the value of those transactions will be up to an order-of-magnitude less than the ones that fit into the block.
Thus as they say, their model still applies, although the precise quantitative results might be slightly different, the qualitative result is expected to be the same. That qualitative result is the proof-of-work does not converge to consensus when the block rewards is less than the revenue from transaction fees (regardless of the block size).
Sorry you are incorrect in your understanding.
Additionally you are failing to factor in that their analysis does not even begin to touch the surface of the game theories of subverting the consensus when block reward declines for a non-inflationary future, as I alluded to in my discussion of the research which of course as usual you ignored because you ignore everything I write on technology:
Even worse, my mathematical intuition causes me to doubt whether the complex “best case” dynamic equilibria of strategies depicted below can remain in equilibrium, because the complexity (chaos) is too high to presume there isn’t some strategy which dissolves the equilibria—with the outcome most definitely being bankrupting all lesser strategies (i.e. centralized control) and/or losing consensus. The authors admit this possibility, [
“we believe we have only scratched the surface of what can go wrong in a transaction fee regime” and:
Put another way, our results are only
made stronger by simplifying assumptions, because we are
claiming that weird and undesirable consequences arise even
if one is willing to grant simplifying assumptions.
If anything this paper is a strong argument against the big block folks and BCH as it shows their model of scaling is possibly not viable.
Incorrect as explained above. Yet another example of why you should not trust yourself to analyse anything about blockchain technology.
And you haven’t even scratched the surface in analysing how the SegWit “pay to anyone” loot and Mt. Box “garbage collection stalls” chain settlement egregiously negatively impacts the game theories thereof above, as the nChain blog article I linked to delves into slightly.
It’s quite telling how n00b you are in that you’re focused on the size of the blocks instead on the factors that really matter, as I alluded to in my posts in the thread about insecurity and incompatibility of SegWit.
You’re so lucky to have a former friend who is so astute on blockchain technology and who has patiently offered you so much information, but you’re so sure of yourself even though you have not invested 1/100th of the time and effort I have invested in this technological area.
In regards to your argument against small blocks you stated.
https://gist.github.com/shelby3/e0c36e24344efba2d1f0d650cd94f1c7
Given that the whales and miners are economically the same entity that can form an oligarchy to make the dolphins pay all the transaction fees for the whales’ transactions via miner profits. Regarding this math, the miner that pays to self (or whale who owns the transaction) the transaction fee for those transactions with much higher fees, is not displacing significant transaction fee revenue that would otherwise be earned by not doing so (due to block size being limited), because the whales’ transactions have a much higher multiple of fee per KB than the transactions of the dolphins.
I also do not see how it follows at least from the logic presented that miners and "whales" (how do you define whale in any meaningful way?) are economically the same entity.
I suggest you reread
the relevant section of my Gist and also follow the links to the discussion that transpired on BCT with @Dorky.
You apparently failed to assimilate all that logic presented.
I see no reason why a wealthy individual would pay a much higher multiple of fee per KB unless the transaction was time sensitive. It would not be necessary and would amount to giving money to the miner for free.
Afaics, you’re not conceptualizing correctly. The whales in the Bitcoin ecosystem will be those that are conducting the most aggregated transactions for offchain stuff (not Lightning Network offchain but just for example the exchanges we have now), e.g. interexchange transfers between major exchanges.
And in general, whales are willing to pay a higher transaction fee than the dolphins because it’s peanuts compared to the value of the transaction.
So with limited block sizes the transaction fees being competitive are dominated by the whales. I have no idea why you wouldn’t understand this.
The whales are thus synonomous with the miners because they are paying all the revenue of the miners so they can mine it themselves or demand kickbacks from the miners. Either way, they’re economically the same entity because they pay themselves (other than the cost of the electricity which they can limit once they have the oligarchy in place which is the long-range plan of the Mossad)
You could try to argue that the whales will be numerous and unaligned thus they can’t coordinate sufficiently (i.e. if they each had their own miner, they would have to wait too long to pay themselves). Yet this is a dubious argument on the face of it assuming they can tolerate long delays between settlement, and additionally the game theory flaws outlined in the aforementioned research paper force them to coordinate to form an oligarchy.
I agree that the Core roadmap will lead to off chain transactions which will facilitate fractional reserve banking. FRB is a sociatial issue, however, it is the acceptance of a lie (the simultaneous granting of two claims that cannot be simultaneously honored in many circumstances yet are promised to be simultaneously honored) as acceptable and tolerated behavior. I highly doubt any form of cryptocurrency will eliminate FRB as society is not yet ready to embrace truth in this area.
But SegWit legitimizes these
Mt. Box transactions as somehow bona fide because they in theory ultimately settle on the blockchain. But they do not really, which is what the nChain blog and
my discussion with the author of Bitbay was pointing out.
It’s not just Mt. Box aspect but also the fact the uncoordinated settlement to the block chain could cause “garbage collection” spikes in transaction volume load and thus spikes in transaction fees, thus exacerbating the game theory flaws.
The link to the nChain blog and my Redditard discussion was in
my earlier post in this thread.
I have seen no realistic threat that would lead to SEGWIT being rolled back and transactions being stolen. Should a group of miners attempt this it would be just another hard fork against consensus.
Incorrect. You’ve entirely failed to read my writings!
The SegWit transactions become a booty that can be spent by the mining cartel that does the chain reorganization. This is unlike normal Bitcoin transactions wherein the miner does not have the private key so can’t steal the funds.
Additionally since Bitmain et al have BTC they can purchase BCH with it, but hang on to those private keys for the BTC they spent. When they roll back the chain to August 4, then they can steal back all the BTC they paid for BCH, while also keeping all the BCH also.
Thus the huge difference is the chain rollback is financed and paid for in advance!
Cripes man. You do not even grok basic technological and economics facts and thus you should be more circumspect.
A hard fork based on a foundation of stealing will go no where. The miners could also create a hard fork giving them an extra 21 million bitcoin to make that fork viable, however, they need to convince everyone to go along with it.
No you misunderstand. Those who are using SegWit are using an illegal fork of Bitcoin and are giving away their BTC to which ever miners want to spend them. This is a flaw in SegWit. The miners will simply avail of the fools which follow Blockstream and do not understand that signing your BTC over to “pay to anyone” is damn foolish.
Bitcoin does not protect you from your own stupidity. It is designed to take capital away from the foolish and award it to the astute.
As for my theory of the miners stealing back BTC they used to pay for BCH, they’ll justify this as necessary to destroy the illegal fork of Bitcoin that lowered the security of Satoshi’s protocol. It is essentially a weapon against Blockstream which is a weapon against the security of Bitcoin.
The ability to steal SegWit is not the only security weakness of SegWit as I already explained. The game theory flaws will multiply. We’ve only scratched the surface.
That and the reasons above are why I sold all my BCH at 0.172. I will probably also sell my 2X if that forks off and am still on the fence about bitcoin gold. As of today I do not view these non consensus forks as having much if any long term value.
Please ignore me. I want to enjoy the lulz.
Please also ignore my expertise
about ASIC resistance as it pertains to Bitcoin gold.
@CoinCube and I continued on in private, it’s possible I misinterpreted his tone, and I excerpt a portion of my reply:
It’s possible I have an error, but it is more likely for someone like @smooth or one of the Core devs to find it. Yet I tell you I debated Gregory Maxwell on Redditard a few months ago and afaics he was not winning.
There is no doubt that they have some very smart mathematicians and cryptographers.
But they also designed Side-chains which have turned out to be totally insecure.
I think what we should conclude is that it is very likely that who ever designed Bitcoin put very high IQ people (much smarter than anyone currently working on any blockchain) and many man-decades of work into analysis and planning.
It is not likely that Adam Back et al can so quickly design sound things. Also those guys are not well rounded enough. Their economics and game theory training is insufficient.
Decentralized ledgers require polymath expertise. I am not an expert in any one area but I am interested in all the areas. And I have had 4 years to learn and reflect. But I have probably have mistakes also.
I will give you one rule-of-thumb in software design. Avoid complexity. Complex designs are usually fraught with failure modes. So the complexity of SegWit and LN tells you immediately that they are flawed. BCH is a simple improvement and thus it is most certainly more viable.
We also got into the concept that the least contentious fork should win and I wrote:
I agree that contentious forks will fail, which is why I think SegWit has no chance of success. BCH is at least barely a fork. All they did was increase the block size (and they change the rate of difficulty adjustment but that was just necessary to cope with the fork war and in theory could be undone after the fork war is done).
Bitman backed off and let the illusion of community consensus to form, so I am nearly certain they did that for a strategic reason. And the best explanation I can find is they think SegWit is going to blow up in numerous possible ways. I expect they’re waiting for BTCSegWit to split into 3: SegWit, SegWit2x, and Gold, before they start their mining attacks. They probably want to divide-and-conquer as much as possible and build up a huge booty to steal back with a chain revert back to August 4.
But I am not even 80% sure of that. Who knows. We have to watch the outcome, but with BTCSegWit at $5000 and BCH at $300, I don’t stare a gift horse in the mouth. Perhaps we’ll see it go even further to $6000 and down to $200, or even $10000 and $100. An extreme overbought and oversold condition would be the perfect setup for the sort of mining attack I am contemplating.
